The 25 Best Jazz Albums of All Time

These are the 25 best jazz albums of all time in our ranking, from Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five sides of the 1920s to Kamasi Washington’s The Epic (2015). Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue (Columbia, 1959) is No. 1: a sextet with John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley and Bill Evans recorded it with almost no rehearsal, building tunes on scales instead of fast chord changes, and only one jazz album holds a higher US sales certification. Every entry gives the label and year of the original release and the tracks to hear first.

The order is our editorial judgment, based on what each record changed in jazz, whether it works as a complete album, and how many of its tunes musicians still play. Armstrong and Thelonious Monk appear with later compilations because their key sides were made for 78s and 10-inch records before the LP took over.

Our Ranking of the 25 Best Jazz Albums

1. Miles Davis: Kind of Blue (Columbia, 1959)

Davis gave John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, Bill Evans, Paul Chambers and Jimmy Cobb (Wynton Kelly plays on “Freddie Freeloader”) only sketches of scales and melody lines for the sessions of March 2 and April 22, 1959. Tunes such as “So What” stay on one scale for long stretches, the idea behind modal jazz. The RIAA certified it five times platinum in 2019; only the Vince Guaraldi Trio’s A Charlie Brown Christmas has since passed it, with a six-times platinum award in August 2026. Hear first: “So What” and “Blue in Green,” then see our best Miles Davis albums.

2. John Coltrane: A Love Supreme (Impulse!, 1965)

Coltrane’s quartet with McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones recorded this four-part suite in one session on December 9, 1964. It is a devotional work: the liner notes print Coltrane’s poem of thanks to God, and in the closing part, “Psalm,” he plays the words of that poem on tenor saxophone without speaking them. Hear first: “Acknowledgement,” which ends with the chant that gives the album its name.

3. Charles Mingus: Mingus Ah Um (Columbia, 1959)

Recorded in May 1959, it fits gospel, blues, swing and ballads into one program. “Better Git It in Your Soul” draws on the church singing and preaching Mingus heard as a child, and “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat” is a tribute to Lester Young, who had died shortly before the sessions. The Library of Congress added the album to the National Recording Registry in 2003. Hear first: those two tracks, then “Fables of Faubus.”

4. Sonny Rollins: Saxophone Colossus (Prestige, 1957)

Rollins recorded it on June 22, 1956, with Tommy Flanagan, Doug Watkins and Max Roach. “St. Thomas” is based on a Virgin Islands nursery song his mother sang to him, and his solo on the blues “Blue 7” keeps developing fragments of the theme, which Gunther Schuller analyzed in a 1958 essay in The Jazz Review. Hear first: “St. Thomas” and “Blue 7.” Rollins also ranks high in our guide to jazz saxophone players.

5. Dave Brubeck Quartet: Time Out (Columbia, 1959)

Brubeck built the album on meters jazz rarely used. “Blue Rondo à la Turk” is in 9/8, an idea he took from Turkish street musicians he heard on a State Department tour, and Paul Desmond’s “Take Five” is in 5/4. It reached No. 2 on the Billboard album chart and became the first jazz album to sell a million copies, while “Take Five” was the first jazz single to do the same.

6. Ornette Coleman: The Shape of Jazz to Come (Atlantic, 1959)

Coleman’s quartet with Don Cherry, Charlie Haden and Billy Higgins used no piano or guitar and abandoned fixed chord structures under the solos, so the horns could follow the melody wherever it led. The album, his first for Atlantic, opens with “Lonely Woman,” one of the few Coleman compositions to become a jazz standard. The Library of Congress added it to the National Recording Registry in 2012.

7. Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers: Moanin’ (Blue Note, 1958)

Bobby Timmons’s bluesy title tune caught on so quickly that the LP, originally self-titled, became known by its name. Benny Golson wrote most of the other originals, including “Along Came Betty” and “Blues March,” and Lee Morgan was 20 when he played trumpet on the session of October 30, 1958. With its gospel and blues feeling and Blakey’s driving drums, it is one of the archetypal hard bop records.

8. Miles Davis: Bitches Brew (Columbia, 1970)

Davis recorded it over three days in August 1969 with an expanded band that included Wayne Shorter, Chick Corea, Joe Zawinul and John McLaughlin, and producer Teo Macero edited the jams into the finished double album. It won the Grammy for Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album in 1971 and in 1976 became Davis’s first gold record. It opened the way for later fusion hits such as Hancock’s Head Hunters; more in our list of the best jazz fusion albums.

9. Charles Mingus: The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady (Impulse!, 1963)

An eleven-piece band recorded this single continuous composition, partly written as a ballet and divided into four tracks and six movements, on January 20, 1963. Jay Berliner’s classical guitar adds Spanish color to Mingus’s orchestral writing, with Jaki Byard on piano and Dannie Richmond on drums. The liner notes are by Mingus and his psychotherapist, Edmund Pollock.

10. Cannonball Adderley: Somethin’ Else (Blue Note, 1958)

Adderley was in Miles Davis’s band when he made this in March 1958, and Davis joined Hank Jones, Sam Jones and Art Blakey in one of his few sideman dates after 1955. Davis takes several of the first solos, wrote the title track and, according to the liner notes, chose most of the material. Dom Cerulli gave it five stars in DownBeat in 1958. Hear first: “Autumn Leaves.”

11. Herbie Hancock: Maiden Voyage (Blue Note, 1965)

A concept album about the sea, recorded on March 17, 1965, with Freddie Hubbard, George Coleman, Ron Carter and 19-year-old Tony Williams. Hancock, Coleman, Carter and Williams had all recently played together in Miles Davis’s quintet, and the band builds the ocean theme through its use of space. Three of its five tunes, “Maiden Voyage,” “The Eye of the Hurricane” and “Dolphin Dance,” became jazz standards.

12. Louis Armstrong: The Complete Hot Five and Hot Seven Recordings (Columbia/Legacy, 2000)

Armstrong cut these sides for Okeh in Chicago between 1925 and 1928 with a band that existed mainly in the studio; the original Hot Five played live only at two parties organized by the label. “Heebie Jeebies” (1926), with his scat chorus, made him a local star, and “West End Blues” (1928), recorded with Earl Hines on piano, is the best known of the set. The four-CD box from 2000 collects them all.

13. Bill Evans Trio: Waltz for Debby (Riverside, 1962)

Recorded at the Village Vanguard on June 25, 1961, the same date that produced Sunday at the Village Vanguard, with Scott LaFaro on bass and Paul Motian on drums. LaFaro died in a car accident on July 6, eleven days later, and this was the trio’s last album. Evans also appears in our list of the greatest jazz pianists. Hear first: “My Foolish Heart” and the title track, a portrait of Evans’s niece.

14. Duke Ellington: Ellington at Newport (Columbia, 1956)

At the Newport Jazz Festival in July 1956, Paul Gonsalves played 27 choruses on tenor saxophone between “Diminuendo in Blue” and “Crescendo in Blue,” and the crowd ended up dancing in the aisles. The concert revived Ellington’s flagging career, and he appeared on the cover of Time soon after. A Voice of America tape found in 1996 showed that the original LP mixed live recordings with studio re-recordings and added applause; the expanded 1999 edition presents the concert more fully.

15. Stan Getz and João Gilberto: Getz/Gilberto (Verve, 1964)

Recorded in New York in March 1963 with Antônio Carlos Jobim on piano, it pairs Getz’s tenor saxophone with Gilberto’s guitar and voice on bossa nova songs such as “Desafinado” and “Corcovado.” It won the Grammy for Album of the Year in 1965, and “The Girl from Ipanema,” sung by Astrud Gilberto, won Record of the Year and started her career.

16. Herbie Hancock: Head Hunters (Columbia, 1973)

Hancock formed a new band around Bennie Maupin, bassist Paul Jackson, drummer Harvey Mason and percussionist Bill Summers, dropped guitar in favor of the Hohner Clavinet, and played the bass line of “Chameleon” on an ARP Odyssey synthesizer. The album brought jazz-funk to rock and funk audiences, reached No. 13 on the Billboard 200, and entered the National Recording Registry in 2008.

17. Keith Jarrett: The Köln Concert (ECM, 1975)

Jarrett improvised the whole concert at the Cologne Opera House on January 24, 1975, on a small Bösendorfer baby grand in poor condition that staff had put on stage by mistake instead of the concert grand he had asked for. The late-night show, organized by 18-year-old promoter Vera Brandes, drew more than 1,400 people. The double album is the best-selling solo album in jazz history and the best-selling piano album.

18. Wayne Shorter: Speak No Evil (Blue Note, 1966)

Shorter recorded it on Christmas Eve 1964, the year he joined Miles Davis’s quintet, with his Davis bandmates Herbie Hancock and Ron Carter, Freddie Hubbard on trumpet and Coltrane’s drummer Elvin Jones. His compositions sit between hard bop and modal jazz. Hear first: “Witch Hunt” and the ballad “Infant Eyes,” on which Hubbard sits out.

19. Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong: Ella and Louis (Verve, 1956)

Recorded on August 16, 1956, with the Oscar Peterson Quartet: Peterson, Herb Ellis, Ray Brown and Buddy Rich. Producer Norman Granz chose mostly slow and medium-tempo ballads, and Armstrong had the final say on songs and keys. Two more Verve albums followed, Ella and Louis Again (1957) and Porgy and Bess (1959). Hear first: “They Can’t Take That Away from Me” and “Cheek to Cheek.”

20. Billie Holiday: Lady in Satin (Columbia, 1958)

Holiday asked for Ray Ellis and his string orchestra after hearing his arrangement of “For All We Know,” and recorded the album in February 1958. Her voice had become fragile and raspy by then, but her phrasing was intact, and Ellis wrote the arrangements to fit what her voice could still do. It was the next-to-last album she completed; she died in July 1959. Hear first: “I’m a Fool to Want You.”

21. Thelonious Monk: Genius of Modern Music, Vol. 1 (Blue Note, 1956)

Monk’s first recordings as a leader, made for Blue Note in 1947 and 1948 with Art Blakey on drums in 1947 and Milt Jackson on vibraphone in 1948, collected on this 12-inch LP. It holds Monk’s own early versions of “‘Round Midnight,” “Ruby, My Dear,” “Well, You Needn’t,” “In Walked Bud” and “Epistrophy.” For the style around him, see our guide to bebop.

22. Clifford Brown and Max Roach: Clifford Brown & Max Roach (EmArcy, 1954)

The co-led quintet with Harold Land, Richie Powell and George Morrow recorded the original 10-inch LP in Hollywood in August 1954. Brown’s “Joy Spring,” written for his wife, and “Daahoud” both became standards. The band lasted about two and a half years: Brown and Powell died in a car accident on June 26, 1956, when Brown was 25.

23. Weather Report: Heavy Weather (Columbia, 1977)

Joe Zawinul and Wayne Shorter’s band, now with Jaco Pastorius on bass, opens with “Birdland,” an instrumental that became a commercial hit and later a jazz standard. Pastorius’s own “Teen Town” puts the electric bass in the lead role. DownBeat gave the album five stars and its readers voted it album of the year, and it entered the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2011.

24. Robert Glasper Experiment: Black Radio (Blue Note, 2012)

Glasper’s band backs a run of R&B and hip-hop singers, from Erykah Badu on Mongo Santamaría’s “Afro Blue” to Lalah Hathaway, Lupe Fiasco and Bilal, and closes with a cover of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” A jazz group on Blue Note won the Grammy for Best R&B Album with it in 2013.

25. Kamasi Washington: The Epic (Brainfeeder, 2015)

Nearly three hours of music by the Los Angeles players Washington grew up with, augmented with a 32-piece orchestra and a 20-person choir that he arranged himself. Flying Lotus released it on his Brainfeeder label in May 2015, the year Washington also played saxophone on Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly. Hear first: “Change of the Guard” and his version of “Cherokee.”

Where to Start if You Are New to Jazz

Start with Kind of Blue, Time Out, Getz/Gilberto and Ella and Louis, all built on clear melodies. Then Somethin’ Else, Moanin’ and Maiden Voyage lead into the Blue Note sound. Coming from funk or rock, try Head Hunters and Heavy Weather; from hip-hop or R&B, Black Radio. Our list of the best jazz albums for beginners is picked only for first-time listeners.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the best jazz album of all time?

On this list it is Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue (Columbia, 1959). Its tunes are built on scales rather than fast chord changes, it puts John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley and Bill Evans in one band, and the RIAA certified it five times platinum in 2019. John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme and Charles Mingus’s Mingus Ah Um are the strongest alternatives.

What is the best-selling jazz album of all time?

In the United States it is now the Vince Guaraldi Trio’s A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965), which the RIAA certified six times platinum in August 2026. Before that, Kind of Blue was the highest-certified jazz album, at five times platinum since 2019. Among solo albums, Keith Jarrett’s The Köln Concert (ECM, 1975) is the best-selling in jazz history.

What are the best live jazz albums?

Three albums on this list were recorded in front of an audience: Bill Evans’s Waltz for Debby (Village Vanguard, 1961), Duke Ellington’s Ellington at Newport (1956) and Keith Jarrett’s The Köln Concert (1975). The original Ellington at Newport LP mixed live tape with studio re-recordings, so the expanded 1999 edition is the better document of the concert.